AES Standards News Blog

January 2014

New project AES-X214, XML Implementation of ADL, has been initiated and assigned to working group SC-07-01.

This new project will create a set of XML elements and a schema that fully represents AES31-3 ADL documents; and to provide an XSLT style sheet for reformatting the XML document in plain-text EDML format.

AES31-3, AES standard for network and file transfer of audio - Audio-file transfer and exchange - Part 3: Simple project interchange, was originally pubished in 2001, updated in 2008, and recently reaffirmed. It's scope is, "to provide a convention for expressing edit data in text form in a manner that enables simple and accurate computer parsing while retaining human readability. It also describes a method for expressing time-code information in character notation. It supports common professional audio sampling frequencies, video frame rates, and film framing. This document addresses the core need of the AES31 series of standards in providing a simple but extensible system for passing audio material between systems."

However, EDML is an idiosyncratic format not widely supported, resembling parsed-text edit-decision list formats of earlier years. XML is a widely adopted encoding format which can have format restrictions placed upon it via DTD or schema documents which can aid in instance document validation. Converting EDML into an XML representation opens the use of the documents up to any tool that can parse XML. It also allows for multi-byte encodings such as UTF-8, surpassing the limitation of the ASCII-US encoding of EDML.

Backwards compatibility to EDML may be achieved via a style sheet through an XSLT transformation.